1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is in telecommunications, particularly broadcast message transmission of a plurality of messages.
2. Related Art
Certain organizations, for example school districts and youth sports leagues, frequently need to send a single message to a plurality of receivers. Such messages may include emergency notices, for example weather related problems like hurricanes. Certain other messages may be non-emergencies but time sensitive nonetheless, such as a scheduling change for a little league game. In order to send such broadcast messages, products and services have been developed for the relevant organizations, such as those offered by the applicant herein, Groupcast LLC.
Some broadcast messaging services send telephone messages in the form of a voicemail through the traditional publicly switched telephone network (“PSTN”). Other services may offer voicemail services through the voice over internet protocol (“VOIP”). Both access the cellular telephone network. Message broadcasting is also made by email and texting. In any of these cases, certain hardware structures and standardized protocols must be used and are unavoidable to broadcast messages at all.
User organizations that send the broadcast messages bear the burden of keeping current the lists of participants to be contacted when a message is broadcast, and their contact information including telephone numbers and email addresses. As participants and their contact information change, the user organization must enter that data in their own data bases of call lists resident in the organizations' computers. The state of the art has been that for broadcast messaging services, the user organization had to enter the same data a second time in the call list database resident in the computers of the broadcast messaging service.